Newly-graduated non-Indigenous teachers who go to remote Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula (CYP) schools may experience a range of difficulties. This paper makes some observations about one of them: the difficulty of teaching students whose first language is not English and for whom English may well be only one of several languages spoken. Moreover, none of these other languages belongs to the same Indo-European language family as English. The ramifications extend far beyond the intellectual recognition that language, normative modes of thinking and reasoning and social values are interwoven, mutually reinforcing and almost impossible to disentangle.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.